That was the bounty offered by the Malaysian badminton enthusiast and gold mine owner Andrew Kam. In July, Kam announced that any Malaysian badminton player who took home top honors in London would be rewarded with portable concrete vibrator a roughly 25-pound bar of gold.
“This is my challenge to our players,” he said at the time. “I hope it will motivate them to try even harder.”
He fell to his archrival and the reigning king of the game, Lin Dan of China, in a tense and mesmerizing 79-minute contest that ended 21-19 in the third and decisive game. The score had been tied, 19-19, but Lin played the final 3 points flawlessly, and in the last rally he stood and watched a shot by Lee sail an inch or two past the line.
When the shuttle was called out, Lin bolted into the empty space power cord near the court at Wembley Arena, a display of ecstasy punctuated by tears, a flop on the floor and his go-to ritual: the shirt toss into the crowd.
“You’ve got to understand, Lee is our national hero, because badminton is our national game,” said Rory Tan of Malaysia, who spoke with a Malaysian flag draped on his shoulders. “The way every kid in England plays football, every kid in Malaysia plays badminton.”
The fans from China are every bit as smitten, though there’s also a heartthrob element to the worship that Lin inspires.
Lin also has Lee’s number. The two met in the finals of the Olympics in Beijing, and there, too, Lin won gold. More recently, Lin prevailed at a match in the world championship a year ago, played here. Lee lost after dropping two match points, an ending that he has said still haunts him.
This was Lee’s opportunity for revenge, and the proceedings had a kind of cage-match atmosphere. Two British announcers stood before the audience in the lead-up to the first point and gas appliance parts seemed eager to banish the genteel, loping game many British imagine when they think of badminton.
The wound caused by that scandal will probably not heal anytime soon, but the Lee-Lin showdown demonstrated what a riveting spectacle badminton can be when played all out. It’s a game of brute force and deft touch, with the shuttle traveling at more than 150 miles per hour after an overhead smash and at the pace of a crawl when dinked over the net.
Lin is a master of deception, skilled at faking left when he is shooting right, or hitting the shuttle soft and short when he leaps high and looks as if he is going to pummel it long. Lee, though, was rarely fooled. These two have played each other so many times, their rallies look like carefully runescape accounts choreographed dances executed at blazing speeds.
After that, it was one tie after another. At 19-19, the crowd was in something close to a frenzy, and the players — because of nerves or exhaustion — kept asking for breaks to have the court wiped down or to trade a used shuttle for a new one.
There was a news conference afterward, but as with many of these trilingual affairs, it was hard to glean much information. Lin is marrying, and he plans to invite Lee to the wedding; Lee will retire before the next Olympics; and at 19-19, each player was hoping the other would make a mistake.
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